RatGeyser
Dennis Báthory-Kitsz
Original program notes
RatGeyser was written for Michael Manion. Samples were recorded from several voices—mine, my wife Stevie’s, sculptor Pavel Kraus, Bill Gates (the interview I did with him in 1980), slam poet Shannon Williams (from my sound sculpture for Manifest Poetry), and a few clips from commercials—and devolving/re-evolving architecture created from complexity to simplicity and back. The MalletKat uses these samples, as does the accompanying stereo playback track, giving the performer a challenge to articulate the solo line while at the same time struggling to bring it together with the evasive electronic accompaniment. Just as I was conceptualizing Manion’s commission, Lila Bennett told me a story. A dressage rider studying in Florida, Lila was also the barn manager there. One morning, the barn’s owner saw a rat scurrying into a drainage pipe, and so she and Lila took a powerful cleaning hose and stuck it in the end of the pipe to flush it out. The other end of the pipe normally captured roof rain. But when the pair turned on the high-powered hose, not one, but dozens of rats flew up into the air in a zooming geyser of rodents. The title RatGeyser was inevitable as I imagined Michael Manion fending off a torrent of MalletRats with his MalletKat.
This is the second of the Directional Birds series; the first was LowBirds (1999). Each composition is based on or inspired by birdcalls, and each is approximately 14 minutes long. HB(P) began as a simple electric guitar duet, but with the death of Iannis Xenakis, it changed character completely. I discarded what I had been working on—a through-composed ‘dot music’ piece—and turned instead to five bird calls to use as sonic maps of color, pitch, and density. I spent considerable time choosing and studying the bird calls (killdeer, thrush, redwing, song sparrow, white-throat sparrow), selected for their differences of character. Then I extracted their spectra, and used the spectral images to build a musical alphabet. The original calls were then set aside, and the extracted spectral images were transformed several times. The results are almost organic:
The final image transformations were chosen for color and outline clarity, and each was linearly mapped to a digital soundfile. These soundfiles—from the spectral rather than frequency domain—were used for further transformations and as the basis of a deep layering (the architecture itself drawn from the sparrow map). To create the guitar parts, I selected five of the original multi-color transformations, drew multiple channels of Midi information from them, translated the results into notation, and worked the notation for shape, color, and dynamics (rather than pitch—thus maintaining the architectural, rather than tonal, core of the composition). To emphasize the architecture, specific noteheads were removed, leaving the contours in accidentals, stems and beams. The final steps of composition involved bringing together the soundfile layers and guitar parts into a coherent and musical whole. (A spectral re-analysis of the final composition is a revelation of unconscious coherency.)